“I’m just going by my gut. I shook the guy’s hand, looked him in the eye and he has no soul. I don’t see a conviction. I don’t see a leader. I feel like I’m talking to a robot. I’ve talked to all the other candidates and none of them gave me the vibe that Gingrich did. He is not a guy you want to go have a beer with.” – Judd Saul, a Tea Party member and GOP activist from Black Hawk County.
Are the eyes the window of the soul? Even National Review this morning is warning its readers off Gingrich.
Yet what does this man mean by soul?
His use of the word robot suggests that for him soul is the vital, authentic essence, the human core, of a person. It’s Kane’s Rosebud – a radical innocence that survives worldly corruption.
… the “2011 Virtual Bowl.”
Sing along with me:
Cheer for Fucking Nothing
Cheer for old E.C.,
We know that we’re nothing.
Onward, invisibility!
GO NOTHINGS!
Cheer for Fucking Nothing
Cheer on for old E.C.,
Total abyss
Less than a piss
WE ARE THE NOTHINGS OF E.C.U.!
*************************
UD thanks Dave.
The last place you’d expect to find nihilism would be on the gridiron.
Sports matter like hell. Look at all those people in the stands screaming.
Amazingly, though, the money boys seem to have created a small but growing cadre of Raskolnikovs, men who still slink to the games, but hate themselves and the world for making football a pointless putrid emblem of our pointless putrid lives.
“And somebody thinks this all makes sense?… [T]he entire [university football] enterprise has spun out of control,” says a Nietzschean on the sports staff of the Boston Globe. (I quote him in this post’s headline too.)
Sports Nihilism – a new concentration for the Kinetics and Leisure Studies Department.
******************
UD thanks Andre.
… but here again is La Kid, at the upper left, glasses, long blond hair.
[A group of faculty at scandal-ridden University of North Carolina] distributed a letter last week at a news conference held to introduce new UNC Football Coach Larry Fedora, asking the university’s Board of Trustees to explain how the hiring of the coach and his seven-year contract worth $1.7 million a year advances the mission of the university.
… [Among the questions the letter asked was:] How will the fallout from the recent [UNC sports] scandal and the new direction of the football team affect the health of the university?
… “[UNC’s president said] they were good questions,” [a spokesman said.]
… Florida A&M has in the last two weeks. After a hazing death, a hazing injury, attendant lawsuits, and now employee fraud, you’d think the university could do better than reprimand its hapless president.
“I just don’t think the football coaches should get paid what they’re paid,” Joshuah Gross, a [Western Carolina University] student said bluntly, shaking his head over the amount of money [a coach] pulled down.
Gross ran out of money to attend WCU and is headed to a local community college to continue his education. He works at Rolling Stone Burrito on campus to earn his living.
“The team is terrible, and here they are planning to sink even more money into a failing program,” Gross said one day last week. “The professors are suffering — they need to redirect that money into other areas, like into the engineering department.”
…”Nobody at Western gives a (expletive) about the football team — we are all there for the marching band [said another student]. They are just great.”
[A member of the athletics director search committee said that] athletics, along with other university programs, help students with “professional development, personal development and their networking” abilities. It helps build “good character,” she said.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The anti-DSM movement finds its poet. This guy can really write.
Psychiatrists get paid for treating mental illness. There is a strong motivation for them to look at things they used to attribute to chronic personality, or just life, and see them as psychiatric illness. If you have an unstable personality disorder I am afraid psychiatry has little to offer, but if we call you bipolar or cyclothymic we treat you with antidepressants and mood stabilizers, and get paid to do so.
… An apparently scientific argument is said to be “not even wrong” if it is based on assumptions that cannot possibly be falsified or used to predict anything. I am afraid after nearly 20 years in the belly of the beast of psychiatry I come to no other logical conclusion than that for the most part the DSM and the psychiatry behind it are “not even wrong.” … Because of this purely descriptive, medicalized approach untied to verifiable pathology, if I as a doctor want to see bipolar disorder as irritability and daily mood swings (as many do), than that to me is being “bipolar.” I can also look at it as a byproduct of a very challenging environment superimposed on temperament, but I cannot prove that it is or is not “bipolar disorder.” I can only prove that I choose to interpret some symptoms as diagnostic of that particular label. When the definition of the construct cannot escape subjective description or self report we cannot escape the arguments by certain groups with competing interests that we are either “under” or “over” diagnosing disorders. Whether we are or are not depends on what kind of world you want to live in and how you want to conceptualize what people tell you.
University psychiatrists who unwarily hand out diagnoses and pills to students, or who, as researchers sometimes compromised by industry affiliations, lend academic legitimacy to pseudo-science, have much to answer for.
Audience members [at a recent conference] — mostly professors — sat heads down, eyes trained on smartphones, tablets and laptops. At the front of the room, panel members tweeted, checked messages from the audience, and followed the conference Twitter stream. It was hard to tell whether anyone was paying attention… We once knew and accepted the unwritten standards of etiquette: When a speaker spoke, we paid attention. We may have taken notes, but we listened respectfully, eyes forward. Being present and attentive was simple courtesy.
The orange fox with the bad leg approaches my house as I type. In its mouth dangles a dead squirrel.
Standing next to my backyard fence, the fox seems to consider jumping it – perhaps to enter its enclosure.
Instead, it drops the squirrel into a deep pile of leaves and begins eating it, poking repeatedly into the pile, jaws wide, licking its lips.
It hears a truck engine and retreats – limping – along a path I’ve made through the woods. It will wait awhile, and then return to work on its buried food.
It’s strange to think of a world without the Bowl Championship Series. Not that it’ll happen. Stories like this one, in which its filthy corruption – even by the general standards of big-time university sports – is once again described, always conclude by saying, as this one does, “the end is near.” But the BCS sustains itself the same way other filthy American enterprises – for-profit colleges, for instance – sustain themselves, by using our tax dollars to lobby politicians.
The American university – whether through sports or through Kaplanization – has become a perfect money vector for white guys who understand how lucrative non-profit labels and tax subsidies can be.
Not that it’s rocket science. All you have to do is take the money. If your conscience allows you to take the money a non-profit or tax subsidy status provides, you and your friends can become incredibly wealthy. All you need, somewhere along the line, is to pick up the idea that the intended recipients of the money – students, schools, charities – are a problem, an obstruction … an embarrassment, really. Give them some pennies to shut them up, lobby hard, and rake it in.
Lo-o-o-ong article about the cynical online for-profits in the New York Times. The writer can’t say enough bad about them.
The beauty of this money-maker is that you can “use education as a source of government-financed business, much as military contractors have capitalized on Pentagon spending.” You can be pious as hell about education, about how you’re educating young people, even as you’re taking all the money for yourself and leaving your heavily recruited marks ignorant and in debt. You pay your underqualified cyberteachers shit and give them virtual classrooms of two hundred students. You keep students enrolled even if they never even log in, because each of those students comes trailing federal funds for you and your partners. Nobody learns anything, but your investors make millions.
These Iowa Caucuses create a seismic shift in the presidential nominating contests. Obama catapulted to the top of the Democrats’ dance card when he captured 38 percent of Iowa voters in 2008, and then swept to victory at the Democratic Convention eight months later. Without such a strong initial showing in Iowa, Obama might not have been able to steamroll through subsequent state primaries to win the presidency.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: This is the writing of the Vital Hack, the hack who’s read Hunter Thompson. The Vital Hack is Now; he’s Nervy; he’s Out There. Step aside, little lady. Coming through.
Yet why – given his supercharged metaphors – does his writing fail to achieve lift? Why, with all the weaponry (seismic catapults and steamrollers), the flaccidity? Why is this man failing to steamroll the Schoolmarm?
The Schoolmarm is more than happy to be steamrolled. But she finds men who try too hard a turn-off. In trying to get SOS going, this writer has simply ransacked his arsenal – which turns out to be everyone’s arsenal – and dumped all the weapons onto the page. As they clatter about, SOS suffers an empty feeling.
The passage pumps manfully away, but all it’s really got is a salade fatigué of clichés (swept to victory) and mixed metaphors (why would you get a catapult to reach the top – wherever that is – of someone’s dance card?).
(Check out the Google swept to victory page. Swept to Victory is the name of a horse!)
Anyway. Let’s put aside SOS‘s disappointment and focus on the larger notoriety of this essay, written by a transplanted urbanite who’s been teaching at the University of Iowa for a couple of decades. On the verge of the Iowa caucuses, he wants to acquaint ignorant ‘thesdans like SOS with his state, and his descriptions of life there have upset the locals. Many of them quote this sentence, for instance:
Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”
Sure that hurts. But what hurts more is how badly written this is. Note the (still-uncorrected) educated. Note again the besetting sin of this writer — the inability to edit himself. Do we need waiting to die? Waste-toids is great – why add meth addicts when you’ve already provided an exact description of them (pale skin, rotted teeth)? And Orphan Annie? Since you’ve said quixotic, why not stick with that? Man of La Mancha offers the same treacle. Choosing infantile Annie over noble Quixote is rather rubbing it in.
But really all you need in that last clause is this: who believe the sun’ll come out tomorrow. If you dump all the other shit – quixotically, Annie – the terse masterful sentence that results totally gets SOS in the mood. SOS likes a man of few words.